What is Local Business Listing?
Photo Courtesy of: Pinterest
Moz defines the term as an online profile that asks for your business name, address, local phone number and customers’ reviews. Examples of local business listings are Yelp, Google+ Local, Yahoo Local and Bing Places.
What are the goals of local business listing?
1. Your website becomes 2x visible online.
2. Your target customers can easily find your business details.
3. Search indexes will trust your business data, improving its search ranking.
4. You’ll receive various reviews, which will help you identify what’s working well and what’s not.
What are the criteria for local business listing?
1. Accurate business name.
2. Local phone number that matches your exact location.
3. Accurate physical address with street, city, state, country.
4. You communicate with your customers through email, chat and meet-up.
Guidelines for local business listing
1. Follow the basic guidelines as prepared by Google.
2. Consistency in your business details. For example, what you have written in Google+ Local needs to contain identical information in all review sites.
3. Don’t change your business name always. You might drop your search rankings.
4. Point your links and anchor texts to high quality websites.
5. Put your business profile in the right category. You can use this Moz Research Tool for assistance.
6. Monitor your reviews daily. Find a way to reply whether it’s a good or bad review. Usually, you want to delete bad reviews especially those that don’t make sense. Feel free to do so but make sure you still have a balance of positive and negative reviews on the page.
7. You can ask for reviews but make sure it’s clearly stated in the listing’s policies. Here’s an example in Yelp.
8. Active and regular updates are a must. Make it a habit to post quality photos and videos daily. Photos and videos are your contents to attract more people. Hopefully, they will call you.
9. Search engines understand your texts better, than your photo and video. Yet, it’s strongly recommended to support these contents with text. For example, write your phone number than embed it in an image.
10. Don’t forget to verify your business information, through a phone call or mail postcard or mail verification link. Some review sites send you a mail postcard in two weeks, which contains your pin number verification.
11. Sometimes, it takes time for your listing to appear in search engines right after verification. That’s why, don’t make further changes (on name, address, phone number and website) while waiting.
12. It’s recommended to create a spreadsheet to track your efforts and progress.
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